OPINION — Editorial

Death of an All-Star

He was running till the very end

ROBERT Johnston was definitely not one of those spectators who stand on the sidelines of life watching the race and only kibitzing those who pass by. No, he was always in the thick of the pack and often leading it even if he had to poke a stultified bureaucracy in the eye on the sharp turns. Or skip over one of the innumerable stumbling blocks one agency or another was always putting in his and/or the public’s way. Maybe the secret of his success, or rather many successes, was that he always had his eye on the goal and not his own star performance. For he was much too busy accomplishing things to worry about what others might have to say about his methods.

Born in Pine Bluff, he was the pride of that old river city even before he went on to become an all-Southwest Conference tackle and National Football Foundation Scholar Athlete at Rice. He would be drafted by the Dallas Cowboys, but had developed a multitude of other interests, including intellectual ones, by then. So instead of playing pro football, he would become a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, the one in England, and earn both a bachelor’s and master’s degree there. Even as he lettered twice in basketball and rowing. Oh, yes, and played on Oxford’s rugby team, too. In short, he was as well-rounded as the basketball he handled with such flair.

Robert Johnston would return to this side of the pond to get a doctorate from Columbia University in New York in government-and-economic-stabilization, whatever that phrase means in academese. Compare and contrast his single-minded devotion to the next task at hand with the usual I-centered statement the ever I-centered Bill Clinton issued on Robert Johnston’s death:

“When I became governor, he was an accomplished state legislator, and I appointed him chairman of the Public Service Commission, a tough job he handled with brilliance and good judgment. We stayed in touch when I became president. . . I’ll always be grateful for his friendship . . . and all the miles we ran together from Washington, D.C., to Kiev, Ukraine.” Not the least admirable about the now late Robert Johnston is that it was never his way to hog the show or worry about who got credit for his accomplishments so long as they got accomplished.

A former mayor of Little Rock, the Hon. Jim Dailey, recalls that Robert Johnston could be a contentious advocate, but never on behalf of himself: “I think he was effective in gaining our attention . . . . My regard for him was very high, although sometimes he would push the edge of the legal limits on some things.” In short, Robert Johnston was a fighter as well as a runner, a fierce competitor as well as a scholar and gentleman. He wasn’t an easy man to peg down, whether on the basketball court, football field, or in the courtroom. When an opponent might refer to him as “my honorable opponent,” he wasn’t just indulging in the usual courtesy but coming close to the mark.

ROBERT Johnston had a surfeit of careers in politics and academe. It wasn’t easy to keep track of them all. He taught political science and economics at West Point before joining the faculty of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock as a professor of political science for more than a dozen fruitful years. He would then go on to serve as a state representative from 1973 to ‘81, practicing what he preached so well.

Space does not permit a full review of his full-to-overflowing but utterly unself-conscious life. Let it also be noted before we have to close that there was an innate dignity about the man that attracted even his opponents. We can’t ever remember anyone referring to him as Bob, though surely someone sometime did. Instead he was always Robert in our ever fallible memory. It would take a whole team of researchers to detail his place in this state’s history and in the hearts of the homeless he was serving toward his life’s end. May this always moving man now rest in peace. At last.

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